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Renaissance Venice and the Production of Religious Knowledge

Exploring Leon Modena’s anti-Christian polemics, Magen we-herev (1643)

Renaissance Venice was undoubtedly a city of interreligious confrontation, economic exchange, and oriental knowledge. This study explores late Renaissance cultural interactions between Jews and Christians through the lens of anti-Christian Jewish polemics, focusing primarily—though not exclusively—on Leon Modena’s Magen we-herev, a text he composed toward the end of his life, around 1643.

Although Magen we-herev belongs to a well-established literary genre rooted in interreligious polemics, it introduces significant innovations that will be analyzed within the historical and urban cultural context that shaped it. As a work emerging from a process of religious co-production, Magen we-herev presents representations of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam that are deeply embedded in the social fabric of a city defined by religious diversity.

This study seeks to uncover the nature of this co-production, incorporating voices from Christian anti-Trinitarians (Anabaptists), conversos from the Iberian world, and various Catholic figures operating at the margins of Orthodoxy. Ultimately, Magen we-herev will be examined within the broader context of Venice as both a hub of early modern Orientalism and a crossroads between the Christian world(s) and the Ottoman Empire.

This seminar will be a kind of mini-conference on "Co-Producing Heresy," as a follow-up to our conference on this topic in September 2024. It will include two papers on this topic. First, Sita Steckel (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main) will speak on "Enemies within: Re-using inter-religious and anti-heretical polemic in the mendicant-secular controversy." Next, Ahmad Khan (American University in Cairo) will provide an answer to the question: "How did medieval Muslims think and write about heresy?"

Each presentation will be 45 minutes (30 min talk + 15 min discussion).

Organized by Caroline Bridel and Maureen Attali

Historical and anthropological studies often point out what they consider to be ritual similarities between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The study of both literary and material data suggests that many of those rituals originated from or developed upon practices performed by all inhabitants of the Roman and/or Sassanian empires. This workshop proposes to investigate the formation processes and early development and contexts of so-called Abrahamic rituals through the notion of religious co-production.

Click this link for the Call for Papers. Proposals are due by July 15, 2024.

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Organized by Mercedes García-Arenal, Katharina Heyden, David Nirenberg, and Davide Scotto

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are often understood as an ensemble of three (‘Abrahamic,’ ‘monotheistic,’ scriptural, or prophetic) religious communities and traditions. But often when adherents of two of these “sibling” religions interact, the third is treated as a figure to be marginalized, stigmatized, or instrumentally exploited vis-à-vis the others. This conference proposes to explore this dynamic of the excluded third.

Click this link for the Call for Papers. Proposals are due by June 1, 2024.

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